


Confessions from a Man in Solitary

by The_Grynne



Category: Kings
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Post - The New King
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:37:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Grynne/pseuds/The_Grynne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The queen has a saying: ‘Either people love you, or they’re your enemy.’</p><p>She might even believe it. But the line doesn’t fall so neatly. There are only circles, overlapping, their boundaries shrinking and warping under a multitude of forces. Enemies that you should hate but cannot. Mothers who love you for the wrong reasons. Sisters you shared a womb with, will protect beyond reason, but cannot trust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confessions from a Man in Solitary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lanyon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/gifts).



> Thanks to M, K and A for their beta. 
> 
> Happy Yuletide, Lanyon! I hope you enjoy the story. I had a great time writing it.
> 
> Dedicated also to the season that could - that should - have been.

He is permitted full use of his rooms, and—save for the unescapable presence of Lucinda—a semblance of privacy. There are neither bars on the windows nor locks on the doors. Nothing added, only taken away: his service pistol from the bedside table; a silver-handled paper knife, gift from some politician or other that he never used, preferring to tear into envelopes with fingers like a field medic exploring a wound; the bottle of sleeping pills hidden in the bathroom behind condoms, candles, bath salts.

A magazine crew could burst in this very moment with cameras and microphones ready and find nothing at all amiss, just the royal couple in their newly affianced bliss—provided they could look past the armed guards, that is. Not tonight, his treasonous status still tacky on newsprint, but his mother must have some publicity stunt up her sleeve. The show must go on.

 

 

Everything about his fiancée would surprise Jack, if he allows himself to think about it, but he has worked so hard these last few weeks not to— To not think of Lucinda as a person, only a prop.

A prop that does not cry or demand an explanation. Thank God—he has no reserve of pity to spare. Her feet hurt, she says, after the doors close on them both, sealing the rooms tight. Will he mind if she removes her heels? She toes them off anyway when he offers no reaction.

Then she takes his hand firmly in her own—she's still wearing the engagement ring—and makes him look at her. Finally, look at her.

‘I know that you’re unhappy. But I’m here—with you. This is where I want to be.’

The worry in her eyes, the obstinate compassion to the turn of her mouth, are as real and undeniable as Joseph's patient heart, that cracked for waiting. Jack is misshapen from the weight of those guilty, truncated years.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she says.

So that’s another life, ruined for loving him.

Halfway through his fourth glass of whiskey, bleary and mercifully numb, he wonders why Michelle hasn’t come to see him—to curse him, if nothing else.

The queen has a saying: ‘Either people love you, or they’re your enemy.’

She might even believe it. But the line doesn’t fall so neatly. There are only circles, overlapping, their boundaries shrinking and warping under a multitude of forces. Enemies that you should hate but cannot. Mothers who love you for the wrong reasons. Sisters you shared a womb with, will protect beyond reason, but cannot trust. 

 

 

 

 _Loving David has made a liar of you, my virtuous, unsullied, saintly sis. Now we have something in common. Now you know what it’s like to have to hide, to wear the mask—smile without grimace—and all the while, fear a knife-tip cold at your back, waiting and dreading (and yearning) for a single lapse, one incautious word or indiscrete look that would be the end of you. Worse—Better that you were never born at all._  

 

 

 

Some hours after midnight, Thomasina comes for him, wordless and hardened as the stone busts in the mausoleum of past kings, where he and Michelle used to hide from her as young children. He leaves Lucinda sleeping, allowing himself to be steered through corridors curiously empty of guards, and outside until they reach the wharves, where a single-engine cruiser was docked.

If it was the king who passed sentence and ordered Thomasina to be Jack’s gaoler, only by one other could she be directed to set him free.

_Circles, overlapping._

Onboard is his mother. Neither make a move to embrace.

‘Jack, if you have any love for your sister, you will listen and do as I say.’

So it comes out: Michelle being with child, and David Shepherd, now missing, the father.

‘And the king cannot know,’ Jack finishes, stating the obvious. ‘A convenient exile for Michelle, then. How very clever of you. So why am I here?’

‘Thomasina goes to fetch your sister now,’ Rose says. ‘Within the hour, Michelle will sail for Austeria, and once landed, make for a convent of the Congregation of Silent Prayer, near the wilds of Calamar, there to stay for a period of no less than a year.’ It has the tone and syntax of a royal decree; thus proclaimed, mere mortals—the waves themselves—would leap in harness to see it done.

‘And you will go with her,’ says his mother, who is no less merciless than the queen. ‘Protect her and her child, with your life if need be. I may forgive you, Jack, for producing no heir, but not if you let this child come to harm while there’s strength within you left to fight.’

Passed over, and for a bastard, the product of two such innocents. He feels a torrent of tenderness for his hypothetical nephew or niece, so intense that his hand flies to his mouth as he gasps, choking down hysteria.

 _Dear God, your servant beseeches you_ , he implores—but for what? For the boy (he is a boy, already, in Jack’s mind) to live and be raised, an orphan, by his grandparents? For his inevitable slow corruption in the house of Silas, _raised right_ this time? A sacrifice for lions?

This boy will never know his real father, never hear his own name spoken by David’s gentle voice. That was the answer, then.

_Forgive my past selfishness, my God, and grant me strength._

‘Swear to me, Jack,’ his mother insists. Dawn will be here soon and she is committing treason herself, risking her own life by being here. Choosing a child—and a grandchild—above the husband.

‘God as my witness,’ he says. 

 

 

 

_Your wife—my sister... On that boat to Austeria, with me a fugitive and her an exile, there were no secrets between us for the first time since childhood—since military school, my induction into Silas’ world. She tried to tell me that you were chosen. That you are destined by God to be king._

_‘God chose Silas, too,’ I said, to be cruel. ‘Look how that turned out.’_

_We’d both betrayed our parents already—unforgivably, as some priests might claim. Still, she hesitated, arms winding around herself, unconsciously tightening around the child._

_‘David is a good man,’ she said, finally. ‘He won’t become twisted by power, as father was.’_

_My twin, whose earnestness can be relied upon when my own falters, likes to credit God and her illness for many things; but I knew her before the cancer and she was the stronger even then. While my eyes were blinded—by spite and jealousy—she saw the truth._

_‘Promise me, Jack—’_

_‘I have already made too many of those, by my reckoning.’_

_‘Promise that you will find my husband. He needs you as an ally—No, he does.’ She reached for my arm, careless of my bark of derision._

_‘God help him, then, if yesterday was any demonstration of my talents at king-making.’_

_In the end, though, however reluctantly, I agreed to leave Michelle in Austeria—a decoy for our mother and father—and redirect the boat to Gath._

_For as long as you are necessary to her happiness, and the happiness of the child, so then are you to mine._   

 

 

 

Jack is relieved to see the figure of Ephram Samuels, in a way that he never was while the reverend was still alive and about, casting judgment on all that he did and was. It was sense of God’s disfavour, he now realises, that terrified him as a young man. One thing to know his father’s expectations—to fail knowingly, jettisoning relationships and intimacies with a reckless petulance. Another, to be a disappointment to his God.

He startles awake, shivering, hard dirt and mouldering leaves beneath his back. The spirit—or angel—is still there, tall outline glowing slightly in the moonlight, filtered by dense forest canopy.

‘He is with his brothers, under a false name, in Ekron,’ it says, with a voice like a great cannon. ‘Go now with our blessing.’

He wakes again, this time to the chirping of cicadas at dawn, bathed in a covering of dew. It’s not the crown of butterflies that he has long dreamt of, but as he shakes off the blanket, Jack feels incandescent—alight with awe—and yes, with love. He lingers only briefly to remove signs of his rest in enemy territory and to check his compass, before setting out, rucksack over a shoulder. The stiffness in his bones fading as he gathers pace.

Though he will have further to travel if he is to avoid the major arteries, clogged by patrols and tanks mobilising for war, sixty miles north as the crow flies, a man merely good—merely honourable and humble, merely brave—was to be found.

Found and perhaps persuaded, as God wills it, to be great. 

 

 

 

> _Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false ones, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be._
> 
> _\--_ David Malouf _, An Imaginary Life_

**Author's Note:**

> The line, ‘Either people love you/ or they’re your enemy,’ is from 'Rubaiyat' by Nazim Hikmet. The title is inspired by another poem by Hikmet, 'Letters from a Man in Solitary'.


End file.
